What’s happening:
The recent achievement of fusion ignition at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) marks a monumental scientific step in controlling the physics involved in the quest for future limitless clean energy. Scientists are also taking advantage of the extreme, star-like conditions created at the NIF to gain insight into the nature of stars and the origin of the elements.
At the Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility located at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, a team of scientists are studying the environments created during laser shots at the NIF to better understand its potential as a testbed for nuclear astrophysics research.
Why it matters:
Chemical elements form in extreme stellar environments, like supernovae and neutron-star mergers. The intense conditions produced at the NIF mimic those in stars, making it a powerful testbed for exploring nuclear physics.
ATLAS capabilities are enabling scientists to characterize the NIF environment with the ultimate goal of understanding the processes that create heavy nuclei — like gold, platinum and uranium — and validating current models of stellar events and the early universe.
The details:
At the NIF, laser beams cause a capsule filled with fusion fuel to release large amounts of energy by the same processes that occur in stars. In the NIF-ATLAS experiments, where a small amount of argon gas is added to the fuel, reactions produce radioactive argon isotopes, which are collected from the NIF and shipped to ATLAS.
There, the argon is analyzed for evidence of particular nuclear reactions that demonstrate the synthesis of new atoms and could indicate the achievement of laboratory conditions necessary for the astrophysical r-process, which is responsible for the production of about half of the heavy elements in nature and is believed to occur in stellar explosions.
This work is supported by DOE’s Office of Nuclear Physics.
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